This is National Book Award winner Jonathan Franzen's story of growing up squirming in his own overly sensitive skin, first as a "small and fundamentally ridiculous person," then a strangely happy adolescent, and finally as an adult with powerful and inconvenient passions. Beginning and ending with the death of his strong-willed mother, Franzen variously describes the explosive dynamics of a Christian youth fellowship in the hedonistic 1970s, the effect of Kafka's fiction on his own protracted quest to lose his virginity, and the web of connections between global warming, his all-consuming marriage, and birdwatching.